Eisner Food Stores was a chain of supermarkets in

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

and

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

. It was acquired by The Jewel Companies, Inc. in 1957. The Eisner stores were rebranded as Jewel in 1985.

History

Albert Eisner opened a few

Piggly Wiggly Piggly Wiggly is an American supermarket chain operating in the American Southern and Midwestern regions run by Piggly Wiggly, LLC, an affiliate of C&S Wholesale Grocers. Its first outlet opened in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee, and is notable fo ...

stores in

Champaign, Illinois Champaign ( ) is a city in Champaign County, Illinois, United States. The population was 88,302 at the 2020 census. It is the tenth-most populous municipality in Illinois and the fourth most populous city in Illinois outside the Chicago metropo ...

. He soon founded his own chain, Eisner Grocery. It soon grew into a 43-store chain of supermarkets with operations in downstate Illinois and Western Indiana.

Acquisition by Jewel

In 1957, The Jewel Companies, Inc. acquired Eisner Food Stores with its 41 stores in Illinois and Indiana. Eisner continued to be managed from Champaign, Illinois. Within a few years, the Eisner stores began to closely resemble Jewel in both appearance and marketing strategies.

Eisner-Osco Family Centers

In Indianapolis, Eisner opened the first two Eisner Food-Osco Drug Family Shopping Centers in 1972 in which an Eisner Food and an Osco Drug are placed side-by-side underneath a single roof and separate by a partial wall. Following the acquisition by Jewel, most Eisner stores were remodeled into Eisner-Osco stores, which combined the products sold by Eisner and

Osco Drug Osco Drug and Sav-on Drugs were the names of a pair of chain pharmacies that operated in the United States. Osco Drug was founded by the Skaggs family. Alpha Beta grocery store was purchased by American Stores in 1961. Skaggs Drug Centers boug ...

. The new stores included common checkout stands but separate store management, all under one roof.

Turn-Style/Eisner Family Centers

In Indianapolis, Jewel opened three Turn-Style/Eisner Family Centers in late 1970 that combined the two stores under one roof. This concept did not last very long and the three Indianapolis family centers were converted into Osco Drug stores in 1977.

Big E Warehouse Foods

In 1977, Eisner created a

warehouse store A warehouse store or warehouse supermarket is a food and grocery retailer that operates stores geared toward offering deeper discounted prices than a traditional supermarket. These stores offer a no-frills experience and warehouse shelving stocke ...

chain called Big E Warehouse Foods which sold food and other items at deep discounts. This money-losing experiment did not last very long. In Indianapolis, Eisner sold five out of eight Big E stores to rival Preston-Safeway while closing the remain three stores in 1983.

Demise of the Eisner brand

In 1984, Eisner's parent, the Jewel Companies was unable to defend itself from a very expensive

hostile takeover In business, a takeover is the purchase of one company (the ''target'') by another (the ''acquirer'' or ''bidder''). In the UK, the term refers to the acquisition of a public company whose shares are listed on a stock exchange, in contrast to t ...

American Stores American Stores Company was an American public corporation and a holding company which ran chains of supermarkets and drugstores in the United States from 1917 through 1998. The company was incorporated in 1917 when The Acme Tea Company merged ...

. After the takeover, American Stores decided to save money by merging Eisner directly into Jewel, converting all stores to the Jewel name, and slowly started to sell off the former Eisner properties. One of the first properties to let go was the former Eisner warehouse facility in Champaign in 1986. With the Champaign warehouse facility gone, many former Eisner locations became less profitable since they had to be serviced from the more distant Jewel warehouse at Melrose Park, justifying the elimination of those locations. The west central Indiana stores, three in Lafayette and two in Bloomington, were sold off in 1990. Jewel also closed central Illinois locations that were formerly Eisner in Decatur (in 1995), Champaign-Urbana (in 1998), and Springfield (2006).

Eisner Park

In 1944, the Eisner family donated 4-acres of land to the city of Champaign for use as a park. The park was later renamed Eisner Park in their honor.

References

{{Supermarkets of the United States Defunct supermarkets of the United States Defunct companies based in Chicago Retail companies established in 1901 Retail companies disestablished in 1981 1901 establishments in Illinois